But if they are his own, and not, as seems more likely, prose paraphrases of lost poems by some other, he was not one of the “poets who contain a critic.” Not only does he put the remarkable definition[169] of φαντασία, which it is not clear that even Longinus fully grasped, in the mouth of Apollonius; but it is very noticeable that Apollonius is there speaking _not_ of literary art, but of sculpture and painting. In the description of paintings themselves there is no criticism. And perhaps among the numerous examples which we have of the strange difference of view between the ancients and at least some of ourselves on the suggestiveness of literature, there is no passage more striking than the _Heroic Dialogue_[170] on the subject of Homer between a Phœnician stranger and a vine-dresser at Eleus in the Thracian Chersonese, where Protesilaus was supposed to be buried. The stuff of this fantastic piece is the information, about the matters of the Trojan war, supposed to be supplied to the vine-dresser by Protesilaus himself. There is one passage of literary estimate of the ordinary kind, but the whole is one of those curious corrections of Homeric statement which served as the ancestors of the new and anti-Homeric “tale of Troy” in the Middle Ages, and which are among the numerous puzzles of ancient literature to us, until we have mastered the strange antique horror of fiction as fiction. We cannot conceive any one—after childhood—otherwise than humorously attempting to make out that Sir Walter Scott did injustice to Waverley, and that in the duel with Balmawhapple the Baron was only second, not principal, insinuating that the novelist has concealed the real secret of Flora’s indifference to her lover, which was that she was determined, like Beatrix Esmond, to be the Chevalier’s mistress, or declaring that Fergus, instead of being captured and executed, died gloriously in a skirmish omitted by historians, after putting the English to flight. But this is what the ancients were always doing with Homer; and it is scarcely too much to say that until this attitude of mind is entirely discarded, literary criticism in the proper sense is impossible. Footnote 169: _Vit. Ap._, vi. 19, ed. cit., i. 231: “Imagination, a wiser craftsmistress than Imitation, has done this; for Imitation will fashion what she sees, but Imagination what she has not seen, for she will _suppose_ it according to the analogy of the real. Moreover, sudden disturbance (ἔκπληξις) will put Imitation’s hand out (ἔκκρούει), but not Imagination’s, for she goes on undisturbed to what she herself hypothetically conceived.” This _is_ Shakespeare’s Imagination, whereof the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are all compact; it is not Addison’s, which deals only with things furnished by the sense of sight. Footnote 170: Ed. cit., ii. 128-219. The piece is sometimes cited as “Heroic_a_.”